The Media Research Center hates fact-checkers like PolitiFact because they have a tendency of exposing the lies and misinformation peddled by right-wing politicians and media — so it’s been busy trying to defend Donald Trump and J.D. Vance against getting busted for their falsehoods. Alex Christy groused in an Aug. 9 post:
Following days of controversy, PolitiFact officially gave GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance a “mostly false” rating on Friday for claiming his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, abandoned his National Guard unit prior to its deployment to Iraq. However, PolitiFact omitted some key details from those who served with Walz that could’ve changed the truth-o-meter.
In the “if your time is short” summary, Sara Swann writes, “Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz served in the Nebraska and Minnesota National Guards for 24 years. Walz has said he retired in May 2005 to run for Congress; he submitted retirement paperwork five to seven months beforehand.”
She also insists, “After Walz filed candidacy paperwork in February 2005, his battalion received a March 2005 notification for a potential — not definite — deployment within two years, not immediately.”
Finally, she maintains, “Walz’s battalion was not officially ordered to go to Iraq until July 2005, two months after Walz retired.”
Swann does mention the fact that people who served with Walz have come out and criticized his decision. She cites Doug Julin, “who served as a more senior command sergeant major in Walz’s battalion, said Walz went over his head to get retirement approval before the unit’s deployment was official, because Julin would have ‘analyzed it and challenged him,’ the New York Post reported Aug. 8. Others who served in Walz’s battalion have said he ‘ditched’ them and his actions were ‘dishonorable,’ Fox News reported.”
However, for some reason, that does not appear to have affected PolitiFact’s conclusion.
Perhaps that’s because filing all required paperwork to leave the military does not constitute any reasonable definition of abandonment, and someone’s opinion does not constitute fact — something Christy does not want to admit.
An Aug. 29 post by Tim Graham complained that PolitiFact didn’t use right-wing anti-transgender terminology when it busted Vance for misleading about Walz again (needless bolding in original):
PolitiFact writers Grace Abels and Loreben Tuquero took after Sen. J.D. Vance on Tuesday, with a subhead claiming he “misrepresents Minnesota law on kids seeking “gender-affirming care.” The fact-defying term appears 18 times in the PolitiFact copy (include the subhead and a caption).
Their “Truth-o-Meter” ruling was “False.” But it’s not as False as claiming breast and genital amputations and hormone-blockers and the like are “gender-affirming.”
This was the bulletin-board Vance quote. as he mocked what Minnesota Democrats called the “Trans Refuge Act.”
“I think it’s pretty weird to try to take children away from their parents if the parents don’t want to consent to sex changes,” Vance said Aug. 7 at a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “That’s something that Tim Walz did.”
PolitiFact conceded, yes, “Walz has taken action to support access to gender-affirming care in Minnesota. But Vance’s claim mischaracterizes the reach of the Walz-approved law on parental custody.”
Graham then parroted the arguments of anti-trans activists who made claims about what the law might do:
When the bill passed last year, local critics were pointing out what they found by reading the legal lingo: talk of creating “temporary emergency jurisdiction” — for the express purposes of providing “transition” surgeries and therapies, potentially against the wishes of parents of minors. Opposition to the trans agenda is equated with “abuse” and “abandonment.”
So their hope is the state of Minnesota takes custody of the child just for the temporary purpose of a permanent “sex change.”
Graham censored the fact that the PolitiFact article points out that “temporary emergency jurisdiction” orders involve cases where another state is involved: “under temporary emergency jurisdiction, a court can issue only temporary custody orders with short-term expiration dates and must immediately communicate with the home state. And a Minnesota court couldn’t change a preexisting home-state issued custody order.” Which means Graham is falsely fearmongering about this. Rather than tell the truth, Graham launched personal attacks against the PolitiFact researchers, accusing one of being funded by “a radical LGBTQ philanthropy.”
Christy spent a Sept. 5 post complaining that PolitiFact pointed out that words mean things (with added whataboutism):
In 2020, PolitiFact gave Georgia Sen. David Perdue a “pants on fire” rating for claiming that rival Jon Ossoff was a socialist. Now, PolitiFact is at it again, giving Donald Trump a similar “pants on fire” on Wednesday for rating for labeling Kamala Harris a communist.
In the “if your time is short,” section, Amy Sherman summarizes, “Marxism refers to the school of thought inspired by Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism. Communism is a political system of government or a party that abolishes private property.”
Additionally, she notes Harris’s “campaign pledge to pass a federal ban on price gouging on food drew criticism, but experts said it does not amount to communism.”
In the main article, Sherman warns, “These attacks echo those of 1950s McCarthyism, when Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., led hearings on what he alleged was communist infiltration in high levels of the federal government.”
If you go on PolitiFact looking for the pants on fire ratings of the left calling Trump, or any Republican, a fascist, you won’t find it. What you will find is a “half true” rating on Madeline Albright comparing Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric to Benito Mussolini. When President Joe Biden compared GOP voting laws to Jim Crow, PolitiFact claimed the subject was too complicated to give him a rating despite admitting the laws were nothing like Jim Crow.
Christy concluded by whining: “If political insults that aren’t 100 percent literal are going to be given ‘pants on fire’ ratings, then PolitiFact should start applying that standard equally.” Then again, the MRCis quite sloppy about the political tags it gratuitously hangs on people and organizations it doesn’t like, so Christy has little room to complain.